She Works Crazy Hours. She Takes Care of the Kids. She Earns More Money. She Manages Her Team. at the End of the Day, She Wants to Be ... Spanked?

Roiphe, Katie, Newsweek

Byline: Katie Roiphe

Katie Roiphe on the curious case of the modern woman's retro bedroom fantasy.

If every era gets the sadist it deserves, it may not be surprising that we have ended up with Christian Grey, the hero of the runaway bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey. He is not twisted or frightening or in possession of a heart of darkness; he was abused as a child, a sadist Oprah could have dreamed up, or as E L James puts it, "Christian Grey has a sad side." He is also extremely solicitous and apologetic for a sadist, always asking the book's young heroine, Anastasia Steele, about every minute gradation of her feelings, and bringing her all kinds of creams and lotions to soothe her after spanking her. He is, in other words, the easiest difficult man of all time.

Why does this particular, watered-down, skinny-vanilla-latte version of sadomasochism have such cachet right now? Why have masses of women brought the book to the top of the New York Times bestseller list before it even hit the stores? Most likely it's the happy convergence of the superficial transgression with comfortable archetypes, the blushing virgin and the whips. To a certain, I guess, rather large, population, it has a semipornographic glamour, a dangerous frisson of boundary crossing, but at the same time is delivering reassuringly safe, old-fashioned romantic roles. Reading Fifty Shades of Grey is no more risque or rebellious or disturbing than, say, shopping for a pair of black boots or an arty asymmetrical dress at Barneys.

As it happens, the prevailing stereotype of the Fifty Shades of Grey reader, distilled in the condescending term "mommy porn," as an older, suburban, possibly Midwestern woman isn't entirely accurate: according to the publisher's data, gleaned from Facebook, Google searches, and fan sites, more than half the women reading the book are in their 20s and 30s, and far more urban and blue state than the rampant caricature of them suggests.

The current vogue for domination is not confined to surreptitious iPad reading: in Lena Dunham's acclaimed new series, Girls, about 20-somethings adrift in New York City, a similar desire for sexual submission has already emerged as a theme. The heroine's pale hipsterish ersatz boyfriend jokes, "You modern career women, I know what you like ..." and his idea, however awkwardly enacted, is that they like to be dominated. He says things like "You should never be anyone's ... slave, except mine," and calls down from a window: "If you come up I'm going to tie you up and keep you here for three days. I'm just in that kind of mood." She comes back from seeing him with bruises and sheepishly tells her gay college boyfriend at a bar, "I am seeing this guy and sometimes I let him hit me on the side of my body."

Her close friend and roommate, meanwhile, has a sweet, sensitive, respectful boyfriend in the new mold who asks her what she wants in bed, and she is bored out of her mind and irritated by him; she fantasizes instead about an arrogant artist she meets at the gallery where she works, who tells her that he will scare her in bed. So nice postfeminist boys are not what these ambitious, liberal-arts-educated girls are looking for either: they are also, in their exquisitely ironic, confused way, in the market for a little creative submission.

Further signals of the current cultural interest in sexual domination include the recent movie A Dangerous Method, which safely embedded spanking in a period piece exploring the history of psychoanalysis. Keira Knightley told interviewers that she was so concerned about the spanking scene during which her character was tied to a bedpost that, in order to get through it, she drank shots of vodka beforehand.

It is intriguing that huge numbers of women are eagerly consuming myriad and disparate fantasies of submission at a moment when women are ascendant in the workplace, when they make up almost 60 percent of college students, when they are close to surpassing men as breadwinners, with four in 10 working women now outearning their husbands, when the majority of women under 30 are having and supporting children on their own, a moment when--in hard economic terms--women are less dependent or subjugated than before. …

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